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After the article “Linux Distro as Food” which has been very successful i’ve decided to think this time: If every Linux distribution was a song, which would you choose to listen ?

I’ll try to resume for every distro the keywords that come to my mind thinking at it; add to these keyword the year of publication and the word song, we’ll see what’s the first music video of an artist doing a search in google video.

Debian

The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system is called Debian GNU/Linux, or simply Debian for short. Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel. Debian comes with over 20,000 packages (precompiled software that is bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine) – all of it free.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a computer operating system originally based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software with additional proprietary software available.

It is named after the Southern African ethical principle Ubuntu (“humanity towards others”). Ubuntu provides an up-to-date, stable operating system for the average user, with a strong focus on usability and ease of installation. Web statistics suggest that Ubuntu’s share of Linux desktop usage is about 50%, and upward trending usage as a web server.

Ubuntu is composed of many software packages, of which the vast majority are distributed under a free software license (also known as open source). Ubuntu is sponsored by the UK-based company Canonical Ltd., owned by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. By keeping Ubuntu free and open source, Canonical is able to utilize the talents of community developers in Ubuntu’s constituent components. Instead of selling Ubuntu for profit, Canonical creates revenue by selling technical support and from creating several services tied to Ubuntu.

Fedora

Fedora is an RPM-based, general purpose collection of software including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. The Fedora Project’s mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.

One of Fedora’s main objectives is not only to contain software distributed under a free and open source license, but also to be on the leading edge of such technologies. Fedora developers prefer to make upstream changes instead of applying fixes specifically for Fedora—this ensures that their updates are available to all Linux distributions.

Fedora has a comparatively short life cycle: version X is maintained until one month after version X+2 is released. With 6 months between releases, the maintenance period is a very short 13 months for each version. This can lead to trouble should one wish to use a particular version of Fedora for product development (i.e., embedded systems) where long term support is more important than maintaining leading edge revisions of software.

Linux Mint

Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java and other components. It also adds a custom desktop and menus, several unique configuration tools, and a web-based package installation interface. Linux Mint is compatible with Ubuntu software repositories.

Gentoo

Gentoo Linux is a computer operating system built on top of the Linux kernel and based on the Portage package management system. It is distributed as free and open source software, but includes some proprietary software packages. Unlike a conventional software distribution, the user compiles the source code locally according to their chosen configuration. There are normally no precompiled binaries for software, continuing the tradition of the ports collection, although for convenience, some software packages (such as Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice.org) are also available as precompiled binaries for various architectures where compiling would otherwise be very time consuming. The development project and its products are named after the Gentoo penguin. Gentoo package management is designed to be modular, portable, easy to maintain, flexible, and optimized for the user’s machine. Gentoo describes itself as a metadistribution, “because of its near-unlimited adaptability”.

Slackware

Slackware is a free and open source operating system. It was one of the earliest operating systems to be built on top of the Linux kernel and is the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware was created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, Inc. in 1993. The current stable version is 13.1, released on May 24, 2010.

Slackware aims for design stability and simplicity, and to be the most “Unix-like” Linux distribution, using plain text files for configuration and making as few modifications to software packages as possible from upstream.

ArchLinux

Arch Linux (or Arch) is a Linux distribution intended to be lightweight and simple. The design approach of the development team focuses on simplicity, elegance, code correctness and minimalism. “Simplicity”, according to Arch, is defined as “…without unnecessary additions, modifications, or complications..” and is defined from a developer standpoint, rather than a user standpoint.

Arch is largely based around binary packages. Packages are targeted for i686 and x86-64 microprocessors to assist performance on modern hardware. A ports/ebuild-like system is also provided for automated source compilation, known as the Arch Build System.

OpenSuse

openSUSE is a general purpose operating system built on top of the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported openSUSE Project and sponsored by Novell. After acquiring SUSE Linux in January 2004, Novell decided to release the SUSE Linux Professional product as a 100% open source project, involving the community in the development process.

The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0, and as of July, 2010, the current stable release is openSUSE 11.3

openSUSE is driven by the openSUSE Project community and sponsored by Novell, to develop and maintain SUSE Linux distributions components. It is the equivalent of the historic “SuSE Linux Professional”. After their acquisition of SUSE Linux, Novell has decided to make the community an important part of their development process.

Savayon

Sabayon Linux or Sabayon (formerly RR4 Linux and RR64 Linux), is a Gentoo-based Linux distribution created by Fabio Erculiani and the Sabayon development team. Sabayon follows the OOTB (Out of the Box) philosophy, having the goal to give the user a wide number of applications ready to use and a self-configured operating system. Sabayon is named after an Italian dessert, Zabaione

Sabayon is designed to give the user an easy to use workspace both live and installable with a captivating look, good hardware detection, and a large number of up to date software packages installed by default and available through the main repository. Sabayon currently supports x86 and AMD64 architectures. The SpinBase version is pretty different, since it comes out without X server and is meant to be used by advanced users. The philosophy of this edition is to offer an extremely light and fast base and let the user build a custom system.

PCLinuxOS

The precursor to PCLinuxOS was a set of RPM packages created to improve successive versions of Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux). These packages were created by Bill Reynolds, a packager better known as Texstar. From 2000 to 2003, Texstar maintained his repository of RPM packages in parallel with the PCLinuxOnline site

PCLinuxOS is distributed as a Live CD, which can also be installed to a local hard disk drive or USB flash drive. Version 2009.1 provides a USB installer to create a Live USB, where the user’s configuration and personal data can be saved if desired. A live USB of older versions of PCLinuxOS can be created manually or with UNetbootin. The entire CD can be run from memory, assuming the system has sufficient RAM. PCLinuxOS uses APT-RPM, based on Advanced Packaging Tool (or APT), a package management system (originally from the Debian distribution), together with Synaptic Package Manager, a GUI front-end to APT, in order to add, remove or update packages. If there is enough memory on the machine, and an active network connection, the Live CD can update packages. PCLinuxOS is also designed to be easy to remaster after installation, creating one’s own personalized Live CD, using the mklivecd tool.

Yoper

Yoper Linux—Your Operating System—is a Linux distribution for PCs with i686 (Pentium Pro) or higher processor types. It can be used for both desktop and server use and uses hardware recognition tools known from Knoppix. The defining feature of the distribution is a set of custom optimizations intended to make it the “fastest out-of-the-box distribution.”
The project was originally founded by Andreas Girardet and is currently maintained by Tobias Gerschner. The distribution is scratch-built as opposed to modifying one of the more popular distributions to create a new distribution.

Conclusion

I must say that most of the results has left me very puzzled. but after all i got the results from the google video search engine.. and we all know that it’s infallible, so i suppose they will be fine.

If you have different keywords for your distribution, or i’ve forgot your distribution, just leave me a note.